Hacker News Reader

Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

> ...wearing masks which have become semi-religious in their belief even though there isn’t really any actual solid RCT evidence

My favorite example of how it's become semi-religious is people wearing them on outdoor walks in the suburbs where, worst case, they'll with within 6 feet of someone for a total of 30 seconds. The virus spreads very poorly in those conditions. Ironically, you're more likely to get the virus at home from a family member, but there's been minimal push for masking at home because it's political suicide.

View on HN

So much this

But you don't need to wear a mask at home, just open the damn windows and let the air circulate

People's level of actual cognition seems to have gone down and being replaced by dogmatic fervour one way or the other, leading to a competition of who screams their allegiance louder.

If you think a mask don't help you're welcome to volunteer at a Covid ward without one. NPIs (stay at home, lockdowns, etc) have been used since the black death

Sure you won't hurt anybody but yourself by wearing a mask (or two) outdoors with no one around (for prolonged periods of time) or "staying at home" at all costs needlessly, but yeah, you'll still looking like a fool.

It’s definitely become a semi-religious thing where I’m at. I generally don’t wear a mask outside and people have asked me to put one on from about 10m away. I’ll comply, just to not be combative at that particular moment in time, but remove it once they’ve passed by. I’m fully vaccinated now. I expect this social norm to be semi-permanent and I don’t really have a good idea for how to break it. Even carrying a vaccine card everywhere would, I expect, elicit pseudoscientific retorts that “vaccines don’t affect transmission”.

But we really don't have an evidence that vaccine-induced immunity response prevents virus transmission. And we do have evidence that people recovered from COVID-19 months ago can bear high viral load in their respiratory system: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249642v...

Two out of 6,614 previously infected were reinfected and showed documented high viral load.

That’s a very low proportion.

A prior history of SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with an 83% lower risk of infection

I understand and hope that vaccination/natural immunity will prevent virus from spreading. But currently we only have evidence of decreased risk of sickness. Virus may still live in respiratory system and spread asymptomatically. BTW, vaccination strengthens lymph/blood system immunity, but not nose/throat lining, where viral aerosol producing.

I’ve not seen that last claim before. Do you have a reference?

It's in a paper I linked to upper in the thread.

> BTW, vaccination strengthens lymph/blood system immunity, but not nose/throat lining, where viral aerosol producing

I don’t see that in the paper you referenced.

>But we really don't have an evidence that vaccine-induced immunity response prevents virus transmission.

What I have a problem with here is how the goalposts for going back to normal just continue to push out like this. First it was just reducing R0 to a certain level. Then it was vaccination. Now it's something else that is yet undefined. It's impossible to come up with a rule because someone will always bring up some extreme edge case and say "well we don't really know with P99 certainty". This isn't a reasonable way to manage a society. At some point we need to acknowledge and ingest the remaining risk so that, for mental health reasons and others, our society can return to something that resembles normalcy.

So... while I accept the premise that mask wearing in a situation where you are also distanced, outside and vaccinated is probably a needless optimization, it's still an optimization. People wearing a mask are less likely to get sick. People wearing a mask are less likely to spread disease. That is true whether their base chance was 50% (a sick person eating across a table in an indoor restaurant for half an hour, say) or 0.01% as it is in your hypothetical. The difference is only in the calculation of the absolute, not relative, protection.

It's not "pseudoscientific" to or "religious" to make a different risk analysis decision. People just have different tolerances.

Broadly: be nice. You're not as right as you think you are, you're just braver.

What's more, no one else can tell you're vaccinated. It's polite to be visibly making every attempt to prevent transmission to other people.

There's also an argument that it's safer to have an easy, blanket rule, rather than permit everyone to editorialize on why they are super special and should be given a pass. There's a solidarity angle as well. Just wear the mask, darn it!

> it's still an optimization

Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect, weird things start to take over. Behavior change (feeling safer in a mask) is probably a bigger factor than the mask, itself, at that point.

> Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect

No, always. Masks are mechanical, they reduce risk by some fraction, period. Some fraction of particles that would enter or leave the lungs and into the environment don't, because they get trapped in the fabric. That doesn't have anything to do with how many particles there are.

I think your logic mistake here is that you're assuming that all these mitigation strategies are correlated, that you need to stay distanced OR outside OR masked, etc... But that's not the way this works. All of those strategies help INDEPENDENTLY, and doing them all leads to less risk.

Now, if you're 40' away from the nearest person and outside, it's true that your absolute risk is almost certainly so negligible as to make a mask irrelevant. But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error.

Be nice.

>But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error.

I think you're assuming that these people who want mask compliance at a 40' distance are doing the statistics like you are making the same conclusion about what behavior should be normal (a conclusion I disagree with). Some might be, but I doubt it's any non-trivial percentage. It's just a social norm now that's based not on science, but on a particular person's or group of persons' feelings.

That is pseudoscience. Being "nice" is a, well, "nice" platitude but it isn't science. And after being lectured for more than a year about how "we need to follow the science" I find it more than a little annoying, but not unsurprising, that we're going to do otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com